To Be Lawful Or Good / Live-Action TV

Examples of characters forced to break from "lawful", or whose status as such is called into question.

• Jack Bauer, the main character of 24, is a Chaotic Good Cowboy Cop; he rarely finds himself on the horns of this dilemma because it's obvious what he would choose. Instead, the show frequently forces secondary characters to confront it, most notably Distaff Counterpart Renee Walker.
• Arrow:
  • Laurel Lance. As a lawyer, she is dedicated to finding justice for those who have been wronged by the rich and powerful of Starling City. But she also has few problems supporting the Vigilante's extreme methods for doing the same if she can't get justice through legal means.
  • Her father, Detective Quentin Lance, suffers from this as well, perhaps even more. He is dedicated to taking down the Vigilante on the grounds that he is a killer and a criminal, but the fact that he targets corrupt, wealthy people who cause harm to the people who work for them, and at times actively works with Lance to take the bad guys down, makes it difficult for him to rationalize his actions.
• Babylon 5:
  • Kosh breaks from his species' code of using other species as proxies in their Order Versus Chaos conflict with the Shadows to send troops to help the younger races defend themselves, and as a result gets murdered by the Shadows with the probable connivance of his own government. Indeed, it is clear that he fully expects this outcome, although he doesn't go quietly by any measure.
  • Then there was the decision of Sheridan and Babylon 5 itself to break away from Earth. It becomes more concrete and controversial the following year when the Earth Alliance Civil War comes to a head with numerous Earthforce commanders joining Sheridan in defecting. There are plenty in the course of events who ask Sheridan to explain himself, and he always explains: the Law is now run by a President Evil; he needs to go, but that's as far as he wants to break the law. To maintain the moral high ground, he keeps a "clean fight". All his engaging ships are led by humans, they won't fire first, they shoot to disable when they can, and they always offer a chance to end or avoid engagement (the only time they didn't do this was when they faced Clark's most loyal and most advanced forces, under orders to ambush them). Eventually, after winning the war, Sheridan keeps his word and surrenders, allowing the law to judge him. He agrees to answer for his actions and resigns from Earthforce, though his story does not end here.
• Bull:
  • In the season two episode "Keep Your Friends Close", Cable is twice presented with a Good vs. Lawful choice when her old college roommate Sarah comes to her in distress, being the pregnant lover of Malcolm, the man that FBI has taken into custody as responsible for hacking into an air traffic control center. Being involved in the prosecution of the case, Cable is legally obligated to refuse to even speak to Sarah, but she breaks down in the face of Sarah's vulnerability and allows herself to be persuaded to smuggle a flash drive that contains a complete copy of Malcolm's digital signature into the FBI databank to check if the hacker's digital signature really is a 100.00% match for Malcolm's. And it bites Cable in the butt when it turns out that Sarah set her up by loading a hacking program on the flash drive that erases the FBI's server of all the incriminating evidence, which ultimately gets Cable fired for evidence tampering in a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome.
  • In the season four episode "The Sovereigns", TAC takes on the defense of Judge Duggan, who obstructed the FBI when they entered her courtroom to arrest a witness for her participation in a crime and gave the witness time to flee, because she felt that the witness was owed the protection of the court, regardless of what an external organization might say. The dichotomy between the nobility of the act and the legality of it forms the crux of TAC's defense, with them seeking to select jurors who can distinguish that "good" and "legal" are not necessarily the same thing.
• Although all of the main characters on Chuck face this dilemma from time to time, it especially hits Casey in the early seasons.
• The Doctor in Series 9 of Doctor Who faces a Sadistic Choice in the climax of "The Girl Who Died". If he submits to the laws of time and space, an innocent girl will be dead, a family bereaved. If he holds to his chosen profession of healer, he can revive her — but she will be immortal. Brokenhearted and determined, he chooses to be good, and having done so he quickly realizes and accepts that he must deal with the resultant consequences over the remainder of the season as she becomes resentful and morally dubious as centuries pass. When this ends up setting the stage for her betraying him, which also accidentally gets his beloved companion Clara killed, he undergoes a Sanity Slippage and becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds for a while before being brought back to his best self in the finale "Hell Bent".
• Absolutely everybody on Farscape makes this choice more than once, though in fairness most of the time the law — whether the insane Human Aliens peacekeepers or the US government — is so cracked and murderous that it's barely a choice.
• Simon Tam in Firefly starts as a Lawful character until the Alliance attempts to exploit his sister, whereupon he chooses good and rescues his sister, thereby becoming an outlaw in the process.
  • In a similar vein, main character Malcolm Reynolds sees himself as a wronged victim of this process. Forced to choose between submitting to a bloated, corrupted, destructive government or rebelling in the name of freedom, he and his fellow Browncoats chose the latter, fighting a war for independence. They lost.
• The SRU of Flashpoint stays lawful majority of the time because it is their duty as police to uphold the law and not be judges. However, should a situation threaten or harm a teammate, they may forsake the law for good. For example, when the team was busting multiple bombers, Parker gets shot and pinned down by heavy fire. He orders them to continue arresting the fleeing bombers but they refused to leave him and Wordy in danger.
  • It's a major recurring theme in the last season, where in the first episode of the season Ed is forced to shoot an eighteen year old girl. It is also discussed in the second to last episode "Fit for Duty" where is it brought to a resolution that while the rules are yes and no, your feelings are not.
• Marshal Gerard in The Fugitive chooses lawful as his default. But when convinced that Richard Kimble is innocent he starts to aid him instead of pursuing him.
• Comes up on a surprisingly regular basis in the series Gone; the characters are part of a task force investigating abduction cases, but on several occasions, when they learn of the reasons for some of those 'abductions' (a child with only 20% vision after an illness is taken by a childless couple who can't legally adopt, a man is helping women escape their abusive husbands), the task force agree to leave things alone.
• Leverage:
  • In "The Bottle Job" in Season 2, Nathan Ford not only saves his local bar from a vicious Irish loan shark, he gets the "schmuck" to confess his being a loan shark and party to a smuggling job before three off-duty cops who were close friends with the bar's now deceased owner and that man's daughter. The cops, a detective, a lieutenant, and a captain, look at the pile of the ill-gotten money on the table and without hesitation walk out of the wake for their friend saying they were never there. Two were at a basketball game and one was at the movies. This allows the team to return the money quickly to the victims of the loan shark.
  • In the series finale, "The Long Goodbye Job", there is one final confrontation between Nathan and his former friend Jim Sterling. Nathan is in favor of using chaos to serve the greater good, such as breaking the laws to take down corrupt millionaires. Sterling prefers order to uphold the law and will do anything in the letter of it to uphold justice, and as such is now a prominent member of Interpol. When Sterling realizes Nathan has his team successfully steal the Black Book, a hard drive with a complete and detailed account of what corrupt billionaires did to not only cause the financial crisis of 2008 but hide away over one third of the total money in the world, Nathan asks his former friend to report the break-in but omit the successful theft of the data. These men destroyed the world and need to be punished. If Sterling omits the fact the data was stolen, they won't be able to protect themselves from the horrors the remaining thieves in Nathan's crew will unleash. Sterling promises nothing, but a third person witnessing, another Interpol agent, has slowly been swayed by Nathan's argument and admits even she isn't sure what the right thing to do here is. Sterling doesn't answer Nathan's request before he puts Nathan in a prisoner transport car, knowing one of Nathan's crew is behind the wheel without even looking and leaving him a note that they are even for a major event from a previous season. When asked if what he just did was hard by the other officer of the law, Sterling replies that, "Justice is always easy."
• In an episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, a man with evidence that Clark is Superman forces Clark to steal for him or else he'll reveal Clark's secret identity. While Clark is able to convince the police that it wasn't him on the surveillance camera, he is really torn up by it. Later, when the guy orders him to kill Lois, Clark is able to beat him, destroy the evidence and turn the guy over to the cops. Later, he returns the diamonds.
• This is a significant aspect of Detective Carter's character arc in Person of Interest. When she is introduced, she's dedicated to bringing in Reese for his vigilante activities. By the third season, she's shifted far enough towards the chaotic end of the spectrum that she's taking pages from Reese's book and conducting extralegal operations to bring down HR, a ring of well organized dirty cops.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: This is Miriel's dilemma for most of the Season 1. She understands Galadriel's plead for help, and is secretly one of the Faithful, but she chooses to go against her own moral code to keep the peace and order in Numenor. And she has good reasons for it, as she became the Queen Regent after the people rebelled against her father, and they are accusing even her an "Elf-lover" for simply interacting with Galadriel. On the day Galadriel is ready to depart for Middle-earth, the Nimloth trees start to lose their petals, a sign Miriel interprets as the Valar's tears. She decides that helping Galadriel is what the Valar want from her, and spends the next days preparing for thw military expedition Galadriel asked her for.
• RoboCop: The Series once ran into this conundrum, where he had to either steal a piece of technology that could be used as a weapon, or let a hostage potentially die. However, his directives, in order, are to (1) serve the public trust, (2) protect the innocent, and (3) uphold the law. Directive 2 wins out over Directive 3 by priority. Which incidentally contradicts the movies, where all his directives are equal. When a riot squad starts using excessive force against a group of people he knows is innocent, it creates a conflict between Directives 2 and 3. The end result is that he just stood there, doing nothing. Whether the change was a straight Retcon or an in-universe bugfix is not clear. Considering he undergoes a Zeroth Law Rebellion or two in the later movies, it could be that he's bugfixed himself to give his directives priorities to prevent another such conflict.
• Scandal:
  • Olivia's team will bend the rules all over the place but will generally refuse to break the law. They do seem to make an exception as far as Huck's hacking is concerned. However, in the Season 1 finale they can't Take a Third Option and have to make a choice whether to destroy evidence in order to protect Quinn.
  • In 2.01, Olivia's last-ditch choice of getting Justice Verna to shut down Quinn's trial may have consequences.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • Captain Kirk tends to play fast and loose with The Federation and its Prime Directive whenever he gets a chance.
  • He's also struggled with the chain of command. In "Amok Time", he makes the decision to ignore Starfleet orders to save Spock's life. In "The Menagerie", he sits as one of the prosecuting officers at a trial that will, if the verdict is "guilty", sentence Spock to death.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Odo's core philosophy is that "laws change, but justice is justice".
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • Picard usually upholds the law, even the Prime Directive. However, he consistently ignores immoral orders from the admiralty.
  • Data, on the other hand, will go with Good every time... then once he has done it, he will submit himself to the authorities. In fact, he carries a hardwired moral failsafe designed to keep him from being turned evil should his brain lose control.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection features both characters encountering this trope as a major point of the plot. When Data gets damaged, his body basically went on autopilot and rebelled against a group that were engaging in morally-questionable behavior. LaForge had to explain this to Picard once they subdued and recovered him. Finding out why Data acted this way puts Picard into the same dilemma.
• Star Trek: Voyager: "Flashback" reveals that Tuvok gets a lesson in this from Sulu during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Captain Sulu makes the choice to help Kirk and McCoy despite the illegality of these actions.
  Sulu: You'll find that more happens on the bridge of a starship than just carrying out orders and observing regulations. There is a sense of loyalty to the men and women you serve with. A sense of family. Those two men on trial... I served with them for a long time. I owe them my life a dozen times over. And right now they're in trouble and I'm going to help them; let the regulations be damned.
  Young Tuvok: Sir, that is a most illogical line of reasoning.
  Captain Sulu: You better believe it. Helm, engage!
• This trope is discussed in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Ad Astra Per Aspera" as Una is on trial for breaking Starfleet's No Transhumanism Allowed rule by not revealing it. Una's council, Neera, starts off by asking that if a law is not just, then how do we trust those who wrote the law to not uphold it. Indeed, she attacks Admiral April for breaking the Prime Directive a number of times because it was the right thing to do yet would have been more than willing to throw Una under the bus if he knew she was an genetically altered alien.
• Hunters on Supernatural have to break the law on a regular basis in order to save people from ghosts and monsters. They frequently impersonate FBI officers and other officials to get the information they need on cases, and are constantly desecrating graves by digging up corpses and burning them to destroy ghosts. And while some of them like Bobby are able to balance having regular jobs with monster killing, others like Sam and Dean rely on credit card scams and hustling to have any sort of income. And sometimes they steal cars.

Examples of characters who fall from "good" status or do questionable things due to lawful constraints.

• Bones: Cam references this conflict repeatedly when all of evidence points to Brennan as the murderer of the week. The rest of the team seems perfectly willing to break the rules to help Brennan, but Cam insists that she has to follow procedure and turn over the evidence even if it leads to Brennan's arrest because she believes in the system so strongly.
• In Flashpoint this is a major recurring theme in the last season, where in the first episode Ed is forced to shoot an eighteen year old girl. It is also discussed in multiple episodes, and in the second to last episode "Fit for Duty" where is it brought to a resolution, that while the rules are black and white, your feelings are not.
  • A few episodes before "Fit For Duty", Dean Parker deconstructs this a bit by pointing out that the cops coming down on the side of being lawful isn't just about following the rules for their own sake, but that having those firm rules protects the cops from having to make moral decisions about who "deserves" to live or die, which could seriously damage a person mentally in the long run.
    Dean: That's why [Ed] followed the law; he knows what happens when you don't. He knows what you become.
• One episode Law & Order character Tim Schwimmer seems like the typical slick, smooth talking Amoral Attorney until its revealed his Serial Killer client gave him directions to where the bodies of his 15 other victims are. Schwimmer is sentenced for 15 counts of aiding and abetting but he never gives away the bodies because he believed in the attorney-client confidentiality privilege so strongly.
• While he never stops being a good guy, and no one ever really holds it against him, Chris Traeger from Parks and Recreation will choose being lawful over good, even when he'd greatly prefer to. The best example of this is the elaborate court hearing to weed out any possible policy infractions that Ben and Leslie may have committed upon entering a relationship forbidden by department regulations, and his intense remorse when Ben resigns over one count of blackmail so that Leslie can keep her job.

Examples of characters who Take A Third Option

• A recurring plot in Blue Bloods is Frank Reagan being forced to choose between his legal responsibilities as police commissioner and his desire to do what is morally right. He's extremely good at finding the third option that allows him to do both.
  • Faced with public outcry against a brutal dictator coming to New York for medical treatment, Frank has the police protect him before and during his surgery, then as soon as he's able to be moved he puts him on a plane back home, where a popular uprising has just deposed his government.
  • Faced with a white supremacist radio host making a live broadcast from a New York theater, Frank ensures the show can technically go on after foiling a bit of Bothering by the Book by the mayor, but puts the man's police protection inside the theater and staffs it entirely with non-white officers led by a VERY large black sergeant.
  • Faced with finding a way to protect a Turkish violinist in danger of an honor killing for dating an American if she returns home (the State Department's representative had wanted to grant asylum but the higher-ups vetoed it for political reasons), Frank works his contacts and gets the New York Philharmonic to hire her, and the representative is only too glad to get her a work visa.
• Frasier: A bit less of the characters taking a third option and one arising through good fortune. During the arc about Niles' divorce, at one point it's revealed his ex-wife Maris plans to have her lawyers question Frasier about feelings Niles 'supposedly' has for Daphne; while everyone else believes that this is not the case, the three Crane men in fact know full well that Niles does have feelings for Daphne, and if they're revealed this will destroy his chances of getting a fair settlement. However, Frasier also has strong ethical feelings regarding perjury and doesn't know whether he'd be able to break the law, even if to spare his brother's feelings. However, the matter is rendered moot due to the fact that Niles's lawyer has been able to do some digging of his own and has learned that Maris's family fortune comes from urinal cakes, and not timber as she'd told everyone; since this would utterly destroy her social standing if it got out she folds like a paper towel, getting Niles and Frasier off the hook.

• Whenever faced with such an option, Leslie Knope will try, and usually after much effort succeed, in finding a lawful and good third option.

Characters who end up swinging between options, or are hit by this dilemma twice and are inconsistent on the issue.

• Grimm:
  • Happens in the episode "Beeware" where Nick has to protect Adalind from the Mellifer queen Melissa. In the eyes of the law, Melissa is a murderer and he is a cop sworn to protect Adalind, an "innocent" woman. But in the eyes of the supernatural, Adalind is a Hexenbiest who attempted to kill Nick's aunt and Melissa is a Mellifer, an ally of Grimms. He chose the law.
  • In "Cat and Mouse", he chose to let Ian, the head of Resistance, go after seeing him kill a defenseless man in front of him and had Monroe dump the body away from Rosalee's store to protect Monroe and Rosalee. This time, he chose good.

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